Reply With QuoteAll of mine are on photobucket.There can be charges dependent on the amount you want to store. I wish that I had used this before as I lost all my pictures when the Kodak folded.
I've got about 700gb of photos that I've accumulated over the years of photos of the kids, holidays, etc. I have them backed up on separate hard drives but was thinking of cloud storage. Google drive looks like a good and affordable option. Any pros and cons? What do you do with your photos? Thanks!
All of mine are on photobucket.There can be charges dependent on the amount you want to store. I wish that I had used this before as I lost all my pictures when the Kodak folded.
Smugmug
"Bite my shiny metal ass."
- Bender Bending Rodríguez
Cloud storage is useful but never, ever use it as your only backup. In my view the cloud is useful as a secondary backup, with the primary being your own disks or disk array.
The reason for this is that anything can happen to third party companies, even the likes of Amazon or Google. There is too much uncertainty in connectivity to them. Thus their services create a buffer for your own backups but should never be the whole solution.
Last edited by markrlondon; 25th April 2014 at 19:57.
Time Capsule / Time Machine for onsite backups ( operates hourly ) and safecopybackup.com ( realtime ) for offsite backups. Should mean I can recover from both "oops" accidental deletion as well as total system failure, robbery or fire. Neither require any manual effort. I have family photos and scans going back to the 1930s. Cost is minimal, in that context.
There was a thread on this earlier in the rarefied and exclusive Digital Photography subforum, prompted by an opinion that a whole generation of photos, maybe the first 10 years of this century, will be largely lost over time due to not being backed up. The current decade is seeing a lot more photos uploaded to FB / Twitter / Flickr / Instagram etc, which prolongs their life, but I think the historical photo record will show a gap from around 2000AD to 2010AD.
Paul
I use Dropbox for most of my file backups, although I'm quite unhappy that Condoleezza Rice joined their board recently.
Flickr offers 1000GB and a host of apps, plus the backing of Yahoo. Maybe give that a try?
Indeed - One True Media is closing at the end of May and a friend has a huge amount of data that he now needs to transfer on short notice. Mine are on the cloud and also two separate external hard drives. Even then I am paranoid and dont keep the hard drives together.Originally Posted by markrlondon
I have a Netgear ReadyNAS NVX in the basement. Wouldn't trust a cloud.
+1
Use photo bucket and the cloud but only trust the external drives
I FEEL LIKE I'M DIAGONALLY PARKED IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE
I only trust backing up on external hard drives. With 1TB HDDs going for cheap. Its a safer option than cloud services.
If you are backing up to external hard drives then use at least two, or get a NAS with mirrored disks.
Can't agree enough! A long time ago a 250GB (backup) hard drive of mine, with a ton of irreplaceable photos and writings on it, just died on me. I took it to multiple drive recovery businesses but it was a lost cause, and to think I could have averted this just by using 2 drives instead of 1. Considering what I'm willing to pay to restore the files on that drive, the cost of a separate backup HD is truly negligible...
Have 2 levels of backup (as others have said, 1Gb disks are dirt cheap) and keep one of the backups off site!
There's not much point in having 2 backups in your house if your house is broken in to / flooded / burnt down / etc.
Following a recommendation from here I use SyncToy which is from Microsoft and Free.
It allow you to synchronise to folders but in a way such that accidental deletions don't get copied. Of course you still need to remember to do the backup in the first place.
I'd print them all and keep them in your garage just to be safe
A mixture really. All my pics are backed up onto an external hard drive. Those that have more meaning are also backed up on DVD or Blu-Ray. And those that REALLY mean something have been made into photo albums.
Admittedly all under one roof, so there is certainly an argument for me to start keeping a back up else where.
Dropbox for me.
I use a mac now so back up to nas via time machine and off site backup to cloud via spideroak.
When I had pc's we used Arconis true image, backed up to two external drives, and rotated them of site, and used spideroak too.
I like to ensure that data i store off site is encrypted as these were business documents rather that photos / music, you might not be so worried about someone else reading your data.
Yes, that was my main concern as well. I was just thinking that Google was too big to close...but yet again who knows what could happen in the future.
Thank you very much guys. Great useful info. I need to look into NAS drives and make it all automated.
I think some people (myself included) may spend more time backing up photos (or worrying about this) than actually looking at (or doing anything else with) them.
Comforting to have maybe but I imagine when I die my children probably won't care much about a massive archive either - if they can find it or even know one exists.
I've got thousands of photo's on my PC, all backed up on an external hard drive. I don't know that I'm ready to fully trust cloud based storage yet.
The main problems I see with modern digital photography is the file size of each individual photo can be huge, and it is so easy to take loads of photos and not delete the crap ones. The rubbish pics take up as much space as the good ones, and clutter the viewing when looking through the pics.
I must tidy up my photo's.
I use a mixture of NAS and other portable media. Also another vote for Sync Toy from me.
Time Machine + BT Cloud.
external drive thingy.
Just to add if anyone is thinking about how they back up there precious data I really would think about a cloud element, nas and local HDD are great. But people really do get flooded, fire damaged or just plain old burgled, or you could find your local backups have failed only once you lose your computers hdd.
After all we all check our backups are working okay every week right ;)
Having the data off site too means your more likely to recover from such a horrible event and for the relatively small outlay its a no brainer imho
I have my stuff on an external hard drive and cloud storage.
Would be devastated to lose picks of the kids growing up etc.
Chris.
Hi
im not convinced by cloud back ups.
i have two ext HD, mirrored and then a backup of that (max 60 days old) which is round the mother in laws house.
HDs are dirt cheap, so no excuse.
Thanks
deano
Two external drives here also.
As of today a WD NAS, an Iomega 2nd NAS and a 3rd encrypted ext SDD just for photo's kept elsewhere.
I place a lot of value on photo's and would hate to lose any! Been lucky so far...
Posting Permissions
